For Some Germans, Unity Is Still Work in Progress

ERFURT, Germany — The air here used to stink from the low-grade coal people burned for heat. That is easy to forget 20 years after East and West reunited and well more than a trillion dollars has been spent to prop up and rebuild the dilapidated region that was the German Democratic Republic.

The day the air cleared, when the sweet smell of the surrounding forest literally broke through, is the day that Birgit Kummer remembers as the start of her new life in a united, democratic Germany, one that offered her opportunities she never dreamed of under Communism.

“You could barely breathe,” said Ms. Kummer, a lifelong resident of this history-rich city, where Martin Luther studied, Napoleon met Czar Alexander and the first small step toward unification occurred when leaders of the East and the West met in 1970. “For me, it was a sign that everything would be better, when the air was clear.”

The discussion has primarily emphasized financial disparities: wages in the east remain at 80 percent of the west’s; the unemployment rate in the east is nearly 12 percent, about double that in the west; and the average wealth of an East German family is about 40 percent lower than its West German counterpart. And of course, those in the West often complain about the $1.7 trillion paid — so far — to rebuild and prop up the east.

“For the East Germans, the process of reunification was to some extent disappointing,” said Hans Otto Bräutigam, who served as West Germany’s permanent representative to the former Communist-controlled east. “They expected to be like the West Germans quickly. This is why people are not celebrating reunification.”

But the top-down debate is as much a symptom of a society that likes to wring its hands over almost every issue as it is of the true shortcomings of a process people here do not even call reunification. They call it “die Wende” — “the turn,” or “the change.”

Here in the central German state of Thuringia, things are finally looking up. The population figures are inching back over 200,000 in Erfurt, the capital, after the initial rush of people to the west dropped the figure to 195,000 from 225,000. Jobs are returning, and in Erfurt and in nearby Weimar, known for its cultural heritage and its proximity to the Buchenwald concentration camp, retirees from the west are taking their pensions and spending power to new homes in the east.

Yet no one here is whitewashing the disappointment, the sense even now, two decades later, of feeling treated as immigrants in their own country, of the deeply insulting perception that their values — forged in a socialist state — were expunged and delegitimized. No one forgets that some of the former states are struggling financially and still losing population, and that 30 percent of the jobs in the east vanished with reunification.

“There is an East German identity, yes, but it must be,” said Ms. Kummer’s close friend Katrin Fromm, 44, a surgical nurse in Erfurt. “It was my life; you cannot just say the East is out.”

Photo

Birgit Kummer, left, and Katrin Fromm in Erfurt, in what used to be East Germany. “Yes, it was a dictatorship, a state of injustice, no freedom, but there were 17 million different lives,” Ms. Kummer said. “For many, it was a good life. You can’t just forget that.”Credit
Gordon Welters for The New York Times

When the wall came down, Ms. Kummer, 52, and Ms. Fromm stayed in Erfurt, while many of their friends and relatives left. They were both single mothers, part of the in-between generation. The young could build new lives. The elderly received decent pensions. The in-betweeners had been weaned on the Communist state, but were then asked to succeed in an entirely new system.

“Yes, it was a dictatorship, a state of injustice, no freedom, but there were 17 million different lives,” said Ms. Kummer, who forged a successful career as a reporter for The Thuringer Allgemeine daily newspaper.

“For many, it was a good life,” she said. “You can’t just forget that.”

Neither woman showed any bitterness as they guided a visitor through the cobblestone streets of their remarkably preserved city, with its soaring church spires and carefully tended medieval buildings. Indeed, they acknowledged that their city spoke to the makeover not just of a region once best described as gray, but also of lives that were cast in gray, too.

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“I think of it as a miracle,” Ms. Kummer said as she stood in a square, called Wenigemarkt, with its cafes, its flowing fountain, the pastel-colored houses. The miracle was not just in the scene around her, but also in the wave of a well-dressed man seated at a cafe, beneath an umbrella. He was an old friend, Arnd Vogel, and back in the day he was a mechanic, because that was what the Communist Party said he could be.

“Now he owns three car dealerships, big ones,” Ms. Kummer said, after sharing a hug with her friend. “Before, there were only two car manufacturers owned by the state. You had to order a car and wait 15 years.”

The soft-spoken Ms. Kummer headed out of the square, following a path of time-worn granite to Merchants Bridge, built in 1325, above the shallow trickle of the Gera River. The bridge was lined on both sides with centuries-old half-timbered houses, once in disrepair, now restored — with money from the West.

Egon Zimpel was another friend. He moved into his third-floor apartment at building No. 4 in 1972. This private man, who still sits at his drafting table facing the window to paint, says that when Germany became one, he packed his bags for the Sahara, and then Brazil.

“I am hungry for the world,” he said, and then tipping his ear toward the sound of the tourists crowding the bridge beneath his window, he added, “I cannot describe how happy I am that they are here.”

Ms. Kummer led the way out, back down the steep stairs, over the bridge to an art gallery, run by a former eye doctor, and then to a monastery run by a former hotel manager.

In each case, they spoke about the West Germans who they say took advantage of them and their neighbors, buying property and businesses for a song, and yet, how in the end it was well worth the costs to their pride and pocketbooks.

Because of the opportunity, to run a gallery, or a monastery, or to travel.

“The two sides are growing together, but it is not finished,” said Winfried Müller, the eye doctor turned gallery owner. “It takes time. But today there is one Germany, of course, one Germany. Not only geographically, it is one Germany by heart.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 2010, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: For Some Germans, Unity Is Still a Work in Progress. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe